When children cheer with joy, women start washing the laundry and the men start soaping up on the street – then it is monsoon time in Rajasthan!
Of course, the monsoon rain after 6 years of India is nothing new to me, but its intensity and surprices me again and again!
In Himachal, the mountain state in which I live, there are of course also the monsoon rains. Especially in the months of July and August, it is hard to escape them. Then the mountains are cloudy, the roads become small streams and there are also one or the other landslide.
But even during the monsoon season it does not rain here every day and also in the rest of the year rainfall in the mountains is nothing unusual, so that the monsoon somehow resembles a normal rain. In addition, our itineraries shift more towards the north – to the high mountain plains, where the rain does not get.
In the plains of India it is little different.
Anyone who has ever been to India, knows that it is quite warm and quite dry in North India. Especially in Rajasthan you can hardly see a drop of water, unless it is the sweat drop on the tip of the nose.
People really yearn for the rain to come to finally order the parched fields.
A veritable sigh of relief is heard all over the country, with the arrival of the first monsoon rain.
But this rain is not just rain. No, it comes in all its suddenness and with tremendous vigour. In seconds, dense clouds converge and then drop huge masses of water down on the ground. It’s like buckets full of water that are tipped out!
The volume is also enormous! While one usually perceives in india above all horn noises and traffic, this noise-culp disappears under the rushing rain that bounces down on metal roofs.
The urban infrastructure in India is not made for such rain. And although the monsoon rain comes back every year, Indians themselves seem surprised by the heavy downpours.
There is no proper drainage system and so entire cities are under water. Roads become rivers, in whose waist-high water the traffic of man, car and cow comes to a standstill. Power failure in the monsoon season is the norm. The ceilings of the houses can no longer hold the rain and it simply drips through, into the room! Trains can no longer run either – because outside the cities, the parched ground can’t absorb the water so quickly and there are floods across the country.
But people don’t see it as tragic, but rejoice in the cooling wet and make the most of it. In the bubble-throwing puddles children play and everything that needs to be cleaned, whether object or human, is brought out and properly soaked.
And as soon as the monsoon rain comes, it disappears again. The first cloud holes open up and the intense sun rays dry the wet clothes in a few minutes and everything seems, as if nothing had happened – until the next cloudburst comes!
